Calabresi's invite

"Bridging Law & Society and Law & Economics through "situated valuation

Bibliographic Data

ID4084409
AuthorsRiaz Tejani (0000-0001-6205-4272, University of Redlands, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume58
Issue4
Pages635-662
Publication date2024-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLaw & Society Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0023-9216 • E-ISSN: 1540-5893
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/lsr.2024.46
OpenAlexW4404487085
LanguageEN
References cited95

Law & Society scholars often dismiss Law & Economics (L&E) as insoluble with our core beliefs about distributive justice, culture, and social solidarity. This reaction has yielded missed opportunities for new theory emergent between the fields. One such opportunity came in 1978, when Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt argued that societies make "tragic choices" about scarce resource allocations so as to reconcile such choices with core culture, ethics, and values. In Calabresi's later words, their book was a "more or less explicit appeal to anthropology for help."1 Today, sociolegal studies remain well-poised to answer this appeal. Taking theory about moral costs from Calabresi in L&E and adding anthropological thought on the meaning of "value," this essay presents situated valuation - a contextualized notion of value that accounts for the moral costs of inequalities while supporting principled scrutiny of redistributive policies meant to reduce inequality but sometimes worsening it. This discussion highlights the importance of interpretive social science in the study of distributive inequality, while showcasing a neglected but generative link between mutually imbricated interdisciplinary communities

Bridging (networking · Economics · Law and economics · Political science · Situated · Sociology · Valuation (finance · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access